At Trump’s Nazi MAGA rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s set was a cornucopia of racist tropes. While he talked about Black people and watermelons, Jews being cheap, Palestinians throwing rocks, and Latinos having babies (which conservatives supposedly want), one insult stood out from the rest:
“There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” Hinchcliffe joked.
It didn’t stand out because it was dumber or better or more offensive than the others, but even I, watching the event live, knew something had shifted. I knew that joke would punch through in a way that nothing else, in nine years of Trump, would. So what was it?
Sorry, I don’t know what it was. At least not definitively, because if we did, we could bottle it up and end Trump decisively once and for all. But I have some suspicions.
Trump didn’t say it. Imagine had Trump said exactly the same thing, except you don’t have to imagine it too much. Trump blocked Puerto Rican aid, he wanted to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland, and he responded to a hurricane disaster by throwing paper towels at people. Then he whined that Puerto Ricans “want everything to be done for them,” and also whined that disaster relief had thrown his budget “a little out of whack” while the island residents showed “so little appreciation!” for him. PolitiFact ended up tallying multiple lies Trump told about the island.
Trump also has a habit of calling places with brown people “shitholes,” while wishing we had more immigration from Norway. Most Puerto Ricans look more like Haitians, Salvadorans, and Africans than they do Norwegians. And Trump has gone full Nazi eugenics by claiming that immigrants have “bad genes.” Well, not the white ones, obviously.
Yet Trump is Teflon to all of that. He can quite literally do or say anything he wants without consequences. On ABC, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu said he would still vote for Trump despite his statements about “the enemy within” and promises to jail his critics, because that fascist rhetoric is “kind of baked into the vote” with “a guy like that.”
What’s more, Sununu said it was “nothing new.”
Had Trump made that “floating island of garbage” joke, few would’ve batted an eye. Heck, as I write this he’s likely saying something equally offensive. But for whatever reason, Trump gets away with it.
No one else does.
This is going to be a cold reality for MAGA when Trump exits the scene, hopefully soon. So many of them think they can be heirs to the MAGA throne, but they can’t. Their weird incel 4chan shit that Trump can wield with impunity? No one else seems to have that ability and power.
The media was primed for it. Trump and Ohio Sen. JD Vance have spent months talking about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets, an overtly racist lie, and the media couldn’t bring itself to call it racist. We’ve all seen the euphemisms: racially charged, racially tinged, racist tropes, racially adjacent, within the general vicinity of racism, with notes of racism, etc.
In fact, the media’s inability to call racist rhetoric “racism” was perhaps Trump’s biggest ally in the previous nine years. He could be as racist as he wanted, but it would be somehow unseemly and not very fair and balanced for the media to call it what it was.
The Columbia Journalism Review, back in 2019, had a handy roundup of some of those ridiculous attempts to avoid calling Trump what he was: “Yesterday, the president of the United States “fanned the flames of a racial fire.” According to a panoply of major news outlets, Trump “starkly injected” “racially infused” and “racially charged” words into a morning tweetstorm; the language he used was “widely established as a racist trope” and “usually considered an ugly racist taunt.” The remarks were “called racist and xenophobic”; “denounced as racist”; and an “example of ‘racism’” (note the quote marks).
You see, some argued, calling someone a racist was a state of mind, and what reporter could ever know what was really going on in Trump’s mind? Or perhaps, it might be considered editorializing to label words racist, because there’s always two sides to a story, right?
But Trump had been pushing that boundary for quite some time. On top of that, the parallels between Trump’s MSG rally and that of the American Nazi Party in 1939 were right there for the media narrative. Republicans knew the comparisons were being made. Had they been smart, they would’ve bent over backward to mock the narrative by proving it wrong. Instead they were like, “You think this a Nazi rally? Let us show how Nazi we can be!”
On top of that, Republicans did this in New York City, the media capital of the world! Had it been in Harrison City, Pennsylvania, maybe Politico and Axios and the NYT liveblog might have mentioned it, maybe not. But the media glare in New York is brighter than anywhere else. It was not a great place to screw this up.
Puerto Ricans are different from other Latinos. Many Latino immigrant communities come to the United States because of political or economic persecution. They have a high percentage of undocumented neighbors. The ethos is to keep your head down, make no waves, and hopefully you’ll be left alone. In places like war-era El Salvador or today’s Venezuela, political dissent would be met with assassination. In Mexico, the drug cartels will eliminate anyone who complains about their economic terrorism. It’s just safe to fly as far under the radar as possible.
But Puerto Ricans are the honey badgers of the Latino world. They are not immigrants: They are U.S. citizens, so they don’t carry many of the traumas suffered by other Latino immigrant groups. They are loud, proud, and opinionated. No one will threaten them with deportation or other such sanctions. Notice how “island of garbage” landed in a way that the double entendre “Latinos coming into America” did not? One of the major epicenters of the Puerto Rican community in the U.S. is in the Bronx, and you know they make them tough there. Don’t fuck with a Puerto Rican.
But if they only lived in the Bronx, the story would be equally dead. The problem for Republicans is that Puerto Ricans live in some pretty key electoral battlegrounds. As I wrote while I was watching the Republican disaster unfold:
What shouldn’t be funny for the Trump campaign is that 3.8% of Pennsylvania’s population—467,000 people—is Puerto Rican. President Joe Biden won the state by only 80,555 votes in 2020.
That’s not all: 1.15 million live in Florida, where Democrats are hoping for an upset Senate win.
Another 230,000 live in Texas, home of yet another competitive Senate race.
North Carolina has 115,000 Puerto Ricans, where Trump won by only 74,483 votes in 2020.
Georgia has 109,000 Puerto Ricans, a state Trump lost by just 11,779 votes in 2020.
Wisconsin has 65,084 Puerto Ricans, which Trump lost by 20,682 votes in 2020.
The electoral ramifications of this brash demographic was enough to send Republicans like Florida Sen. Rick Scott into damage-control mode. And the media, primed as it was, is never happier than when they cover intra-party conflict. (That’s why it’s so stupid when Democrats run to the press to feed “Dems in disarray” stories.)
So that’s my theory: Puerto Ricans won’t take shit like other immigrant groups, and they live in the right places to do real electoral damage. And the media, primed by Trump’s relentless racism and his creepy Nazi rally, finally decided they had permission to call racism what it was—racism.
